Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has turned its cross-border digital-money project into a genuinely multilateral one. On 23 October it confirmed that Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) had joined BLOOM — Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency — as policymaker members, and that nine more firms had signed on. The forum now coordinates 25 industry participants alongside three central banks. What it coordinates, however, is agreement, not payments.
The ambition is not cosmetic. Cross-border payments today typically route through correspondent banks, which layers on cost, settlement delay and compliance friction. A shared framework for tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins is meant to let a Singapore-dollar stablecoin and a Malaysian ringgit deposit settle against each other without first routing through a dollar corridor.
What the announcement actually added
BLOOM is a public-private forum convened by MAS to get banks, payment networks and technology providers to agree on common approaches for cross-border digital money. Before this expansion it listed 16 members, including Anchorage Digital, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, OCBC, Stripe, Temasek and UOB. The October update added Airwallex, Mastercard, Maybank, Monee, Nium, Ripple, ShopeePay, Visa and the World Bank Group.
The World Bank Group is the first multilateral development bank in the room, bringing the payment-modernization and financial-inclusion perspective of developing economies. No single category dominates the roster, which now spans commercial banks, card networks, stablecoin issuers, payment firms, exchanges, custody providers and an asset manager.
Three workstreams, not a live rail
The forum’s work is organized around three areas: acceptance and settlement across jurisdictions, interoperability across digital-money arrangements, and programmable controls such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction controls. The stated goal is to reduce the need for institutions to build a separate arrangement for every counterparty and market, lowering implementation cost and time to market.
The programmable-controls workstream is where compliance lives: enforcing identity checks, sanctions screening and transaction limits inside the settlement itself rather than bolting them on afterward. What the announcement does not include matters as much. It does not announce a live settlement network, a launch date, a transaction volume, or a chosen blockchain or messaging standard.
Foreign-exchange liquidity and correspondent-bank compliance costs — the two problems that make cross-border payments expensive today — remain operational realities that no coordination body can resolve in a single announcement.
The tension with the FSB
The same month, the Financial Stability Board published a note warning that global stablecoins are inherently cross-border and cross-sectoral, may give rise to financial stability vulnerabilities, and could become systemically important in one or more jurisdictions. The board’s worry is not that any single arrangement is failing today. It is that a stablecoin used across many jurisdictions could grow too large and interconnected for one national authority to assess or address on its own.
That places the three central banks on both sides of the trade: they are helping assemble the coordination layer for cross-border digital money while global regulators flag the risks of exactly that activity.
What to watch next
The next observable test is not another membership update. It is whether a bank inside the consortium settles a real cross-border tokenized-deposit or regulated-stablecoin transaction using a BLOOM-aligned approach, and whether BNM or BOT issue domestic standards that reference BLOOM’s interoperability framework. Until that happens, the honest reading is that the coordination layer is expanding faster than the settlement layer.
Adapted from Three Central Banks Join a 25-Institution Push for Cross-Border Stablecoin Settlement the FSB Flags as Risky.